Evaluating what matters

One of the most effective ways to clarify what truly matters in your life is to evaluate everything through a longer time horizon.

Or, as we often like to colloquially say, evaluating how much something will matter in “the grand scheme”.

The project that you’re stressing over today is likely going to be immaterial to your day-to-day life one year from now — almost certainly 10 years from now.

Meanwhile, the relationship with the close friend or family member who you’re no longer getting lunch with in order to spend more time on the project is only going to matter more with time.

The sheer plausibility of this scenario for many of us should help illustrate just how powerful near-term incentives are, and just how astray they can sometimes lead us.

Having said that, none of this is to say that we should therefore bullishly forfeit all near-term goals in favor of things that pass the important-in-the-grand-scheme test. Even if this hypothetical project will quickly fade from your memory, its immeasurable downstream effects in the form of opportunity cost may be felt for quite some time.

There is a balance to be struck here that we must each learn to navigate, accept, and own, where we learn to thoughtfully make tradeoffs between what seems to matter greatly now versus what will clearly continue to matter to us in the distant future.